1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a page alignment indication method and page control method in transferring the data from a data creation device to a printer device and printing, along with the printer system and printer device utilizing said page executive method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In various business places, offices and the like, the printer systems are used in which a plurality of personal computers and a printer are connected by communication lines such as LAN, and the data obtained by the personal computers as the data creation device are transferred to the printer and printed. In such a printer system, in order to carry out page alignment process (process to renew page in corrective manner in printing), recovery process (process to carry out reinstatement and recovery of the data when any abnormality in printing has occurred), and the like, it is necessary to carry out page control over the data transferred from the personal computer (data creation device). And, heretofore, for this page control, a page alignment code to be incorporated in the transfer data is utilized. Concretely, the page alignment code xe2x80x9cOCxe2x80x9d which shows a page break is added to the last part of the data for one page.
In reading this page alignment code, it is necessary to carry out sequentially from the start of the data the process to refer to the code, confirm the length, and read the data (or skip the data by the portion of length). Accordingly, in order to recognize the page alignment code by searching, it is necessary to carry out data analysis from the first part, which means to search for the page alignment code even in the case such as image data having enormous amount of data while carrying out data analysis byte by byte, thus requiring a long period of time.
An object of the present invention is to provide a page alignment indication method which can recognize the page alignment in a short time without carrying out data analysis.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a page control method with which the page control can be carried out quite quickly.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a printer system and a printer device with which recovery process can be performed quickly and correctly.
According to the invention, on the data creation device side, in order to show the page alignment, a page alignment code (unique code) comprising a sequence of a predetermined number or more of identical data of one or more bytes is inserted, and on the printer device side, the unique code is detected independently from the ordinary data analysis. As the unique code in the present invention shows the constitution in which one or plural bytes of identical data are arranged in sequence, the unique code can be easily detected without executing the data analysis as hitherto, and the page alignment command from the data creation device can be recognized in a short time.
And, control of the print control including the recovery process for each page is carried out according to the page alignment command thus recognized. Consequently, it is possible to carry out the control of this kind at a higher speed.
The above and further objects and features of the invention will more fully be apparent from the following detailed description with accompanying drawings.